Doing some research work on embouchures and the playing approach to same, which raises the topic of tone - what sort of tone are people aiming at. It would be helpful to have some examples to survey. It would tell us what people have in common and what range of tonal qualities we can expect.
So, anyone who would enjoy being involved and have Audacity or something similar, it’s as simple as recording the lower octave G for a few seconds on your computer, saving it as a .wav or .mp3 file and emailing it to me. (Please delete any unnecessary stuff before and after the note to avoid crashing my mailbox!) Nice also to have your name and a brief description of the flute used. Also any comments on the tone itself - whether you are satisfied with it, and, if not, do you think it should be brighter, darker, harder, rounder, less noisy, etc?
Looking forward to receiving a note from you (heh heh)! Thanks!
Hi Terry -
So, what do we get in return? Does the winner get a free flute? A trip Down Under?
But seriously, this is cool project, and I will contribute. I have my D Tipple, which I’m comfortable with, and I expect to receive my new-to-me D Healy tomorrow via FedEx. If I can get a decent sound out of it, I’ll record that one, too.
A note (pun intended) on Audacity for folks: To save an mp3 file, you have to get the lame_enc.dll file (see “Online Help”), and Terry, If I were you, I would require people to send you mp3’s. Wav’s are much larger, and you’ll surely overflow your Inbox.
Wavs are much bigger, but hopefully not too big if the note only lasts a few seconds, and there can’t be any criticism that the harmonic structure is impaired by the mp3’s compression algorithm (not that I’d expect it to be). My box gets checked every 10 minutes, so unless I get a flood of entries straight after the evening news I should be OK!
Terry- any reason you are restricting the survey to a single tone? if folks manage to record something wouldn’t it be good to hear at least a long, slow crescendo and series of percussive breath pulses as well. tone is a very dynamic thing, imho.
Peggy’s partially right (K.I.S.S!) and you’re certainly right - there is much in the attack and other dynamics that influence our perception on tone. But I’m concerned here in just the steady-state tone of the instrument - and what it tells us about the sounds we like and the sounds we want to avoid. And I have to keep the amount of work within reason - it takes me a while to analyze even one note and I’m paid to make flutes, not research them!
for me, getting set up to record is the bulk of the effort doing something like this. once that’s done, recording a small set of dynamic ‘tone fragments’ isn’t much more effort than a single tone. the idea of having a library of recordings that demonstrate the range of tonal possibilities seems very cool.
Terry- you could only do your analysis on the single continuous tone, but having some other more dynamic tonal samples would be generally useful, imho, as long as folks are going to the effort of recording something.
my question is: what is a minimal set of brief recordings that would be a good representation of dynamic tone? i mentioned the crescendo & breath pulsing possibilites above, but are they sufficient? a series of cuts & taps might be good. maybe just soft, medium & hard tones. 1st & 2nd octaves? any other ideas out there?
if we could agree on a minimal set, someone could record a prototype version for others to emulate.
i realize all this is a somewhat larger effort than what Terry seems to have in mind. i’m throwing it out to see if others might be interested. if not… “never mind!” (e. litella)
